The goal of the project is to evaluate a) the current state of knowledge aggregation and exchange among state health officials (SHOs), and b) the impact of SHLI and its program partners on that process.

Details:

The State
Health Leadership Initiative (SHLI) is a program administered
by the National Governors
Association (NGA) and funded with the help of a grant from the
Robert Wood Johnson
Foundation. The purpose of SHLI is to accelerate the development
of the leadership capacity of Chief State Health Officials who are
newly appointed to build their personal skills and provide them
with adequate knowledge to be able to ensure the effectiveness of
the public health system in a rapidly changing health care and political
environment.

Part of the genius of the federal system, as Brandeis
noted long ago, is that states may serve as “laboratories
of democracy.” However, a potential downfall of a federal
system is that experimentation in one corner of the system is not
taken advantage of in other corners. This is a particular challenge
in domains that are knowledge intensive, because there may be economies
of scale in such arenas. That is, it may be that a certain minimum
volume of experiences is necessary to efficient, where many states
may not experience that volume, nor have the requisite concentration
of talent to manage certain problems. It is plausible that public
health is one such domain, and it is for this reason that a program
such as SHLI, offers enormous potential value.